GitHub, Gently
Five words. That's the whole toll.
GitHub keeps coming up because it's where projects live: your files, their entire history, and the free hosting that puts them online. Here's the honest minimum a non-coder needs — and the part you can let Claude drive.
Why it keeps coming up
Three services in one, and you get all three by doing nothing special: memory (every version of every file, forever), undo (any earlier state can be brought back), and publishing (GitHub Pages serves your site to the world, free). For a non-coder, GitHub isn't a skill to acquire. It's a place your projects live, with a caretaker — Claude — who already knows the house rules.
The five words
- Repository ("repo")
- One project's folder, with a memory. Your site, its images, its history — one repo. You'll accumulate them like albums on a shelf.
- Commit
- A labeled save point: the state of every file at one moment, with a note about what changed. Claude makes them as it works. They are your time machine.
- Push
- Sending your latest commits from the working session up to GitHub, so the repo there matches. "Pushed" means "safely on the shelf."
- Branch
- A parallel copy of the project for trying something risky — a redesign, an experiment — without touching the main version until you're sure.
- Pull request ("PR")
- A branch formally asking to become the main version, with the changes laid out for review first. The airlock between "trying" and "live."
The good news: Claude drives
Here's what actually happens in practice. Claude creates the repo, makes the commits, writes the change notes, pushes the files, and configures the publishing. Your role is approving and understanding — reading the one-sentence summaries of what it's about to do. I shipped my first three sites before I could have defined "push," because the tool used these words correctly on my behalf until I absorbed them.
What you actually do on github.com
Almost everything happens in your Claude Code session, but the website is worth a visit now and then:
- See your shelf. Your profile lists your repositories — a growing, quietly satisfying record of things you've made.
- Read the story. Open a repo's commit history: every change, dated and described. It's your project's diary, written by Claude.
- Share reference. A repo link shows someone exactly how a thing was built. My guides all live in public view for exactly this reason.
Do you need branches and PRs?
Working solo, mostly no — commits on the main branch carry you a long way. Two moments change the answer: when a change is risky ("redesign the whole site, but I want to keep the current one until I approve") — say those words and Claude will use a branch, and you just described a pull request without the vocabulary; and when another person joins the project, where PRs become the polite way to propose changes. Let the need introduce the feature.
When you want the deeper tour — done in the same plain English, with your first commit made by hand so you feel the mechanism — that's a whole guide of its own on my shelf: GitHub Onramp. This chapter is the toll booth; that one's the scenic route.